Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley was born around 1753 somewhere in West Africa, likely in present-day Senegal or Gambia, and was captured and transported to America aboard a slave ship named the Phillis, from which she would later take her first name, arriving in Boston in 1761 at approximately age seven or eight and sold to the Wheatley family, whose surname she also took, as was common practice under slavery.

The Wheatley family, and particularly Susanna Wheatley, recognised the young girl's extraordinary intellectual aptitude and, unusually for the era, provided her with an education including Latin, Greek, English literature, astronomy and geography, subjects almost never taught to enslaved people, allowing Wheatley to develop into a genuinely learned poet within a household context that, while still fundamentally one of enslavement, provided distinctly atypical intellectual opportunity.

Wheatley began writing poetry as a teenager, and her work quickly demonstrated sophisticated command of contemporary neoclassical poetic conventions, addressing subjects including religion, morality, and notable public events and figures of her era. Her poem on the death of the evangelist George Whitefield in 1770 brought her significant public attention and helped establish her early literary reputation.

In 1773 Wheatley travelled to London, where her collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published, making her the first African-American, and the first enslaved person, to publish a book of poetry, a landmark literary achievement. Because prevailing prejudices of the era assumed a Black person incapable of such sophisticated literary work, Wheatley was required to defend her authorship before a panel of prominent Boston citizens, including John Hancock, who examined her and formally attested to her authorship in a signed statement published in the book's preface.

Wheatley was manumitted, or freed from slavery, shortly after her return from London in 1773, though she continued to face significant financial hardship throughout the remainder of her life. She married John Peters, a free Black man, in 1778, and continued writing, though a planned second volume of poetry was never published, likely due to a combination of financial difficulty and the political upheaval of the Revolutionary War period disrupting publishing.

Wheatley died in 1784 in poverty, having outlived three of her children, at approximately age 31, her final years marked by hardship despite her earlier literary celebrity. Her published work remains a foundational text in African-American literary history, and her achievement — publishing sophisticated literary work while enslaved, and being formally required to prove her own authorship against prevailing racist assumptions — remains a powerful and complicated symbol of both extraordinary individual achievement and the profound injustice of the system within which she was forced to achieve it.